Fountain Hills presenter outlines test-score recovery plan, adds reteach and essential classes

Dr. Jay presented the board with a multi-year look at Fountain Hills student assessment results and a set of programmatic responses intended to accelerate recovery after pandemic disruptions. He said historical data showed strong performance — "83.3% of the time, our students beat the state average" — but acknowledged declines after the pandemic and uneven results across grade levels.

The superintendent described how the district has reintroduced Beyond Textbooks (BT) strategies and a formal reteach program across grades. "So what we're doing is the first thing we're doing is we brought BT and reteach to all grade levels," he said, explaining that students who miss mastery on brief formative checks are scheduled for targeted reteach sessions to retake short assessments. At the high school, the district has set more stringent reteach thresholds and is moving from a 3-out-of-5 to a 4-out-of-5 formative standard for reteach qualification.

Dr. Jay outlined course-structure changes enabled by the trimester schedule: freshmen identified as behind now take "essential" English and math classes alongside grade-level courses so students complete extra targeted instruction without losing credits. He also announced that every junior will be placed in an ACT-prep class beginning with the second trimester: "every junior is now in an ACT prep class," he said. The changes aim to increase both proficiency and college-readiness while reducing the need for external, often costly, test-prep options.

He highlighted high-school gains prior to the pandemic, noting the district's high performance in some subject-area measures ("we were number 4 in the state of all comprehensive public high schools") and said the high school had sufficient points to qualify for an A letter grade in testing metrics before accounting for a COVID-era dip in graduation rates. The district is appealing some graduation-rate inclusions that could affect the final letter grade.

Board members asked for cohort-level data and benchmarks; Dr. Jay said the first benchmark of the year is forthcoming and offered to distribute cohort reports. He emphasized that many of the changes were in place before the most recent scores were published and framed the work as proactive rather than reactive.

Looking ahead, Dr. Jay said the district will monitor formative and benchmark data and report results to the board. He invited members to visit classrooms and review first-term benchmark results as the district measures early impact.

Ending: The board thanked Dr. Jay for the presentation and requested copies of the slide packet and cohort data for further review.